cellular spleens, 2020: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 100 × 120 cm (39 ⅜ × 47 ¼ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
Below lies a long, flat car, a thick black wheel at each end; it fills the whole breadth of the painting and a large body stands upon it. One foot sunk into the middle of the bodywork, the other braced on its edge, no balance, the stance liable to break at any moment. A figure standing on a car, hand raised, wreath on its head, is the template of a triumphal procession; from the emperor's portrait to the saint's the same arrangement repeats. But below stands no horse, a toy-sized vehicle. The rider showing the power beneath him is a ceremonial form that runs from Marcus Aurelius to Verrocchio's condottiere; here the ceremonial form is preserved, the contract that upheld it annulled. The one above does not govern, he only stands upon it.
The body is built from head to toe of bubbles; the belly a balloon, the hip another balloon, interlocking rings where the chest should be. Each carries its own edge and colour, does not mix with its neighbour, no membrane visible holding them all together. The body is not a whole but a deposit; the moment one feels one's own insides as a crowd of parts leaning against each other has passed into form. The head is made by another logic. The full lumps give way to fine loops overlapping one another, an eye discernible among them, a red mouth opened below, at the very top green and black thorns bursting out. As though the lid of the skull were lifted, what cannot be held inside scattering from above. The thorny crown is not laurel; the mark of the punished king, joining mockery and coronation in the same gesture.
All the clean colour is gathered in this head region, grass green, cadmium red, cobalt, lemon yellow; it does not speak the same language as the dusty dusty-rose and slate blue of the body. The ground is combed outward from the figure like rays, the broad flat brush setting off with plenty of paint and finishing exhausted so that the cloth beneath breathes; because the directions of the marks change, one reads the arm travelling across the canvas, a step being taken. At upper right a small figure stands apart from the main body, its wing spread, its scale beside it that of a toy. It is the sole witness of the crowdless ceremony; it has taken the place of the people who gather at the edge of processions, and as the crowd shrinks so does the triumph. The wheels are pure black, looking like holes because there is no other dark around them. The mismatch between a standing body and a toy pedestal carries the whole canvas.
Form and Composition
The horizontal mass in the lower band, with the dark wheels at its two ends, covers the whole width and sets up a pedestal that gathers the weight below, while the vertical heap above lightens as it rises. As the radial diagonal strokes opening from the ground to the four corners cut across this verticality, the feet sink into the support and there collapse the distinction between figure and pedestal.
A horizontal mass stretches along the lower band, with a dark wheel at each of its two ends. This mass goes from the left edge to the right edge, that is, it is the only unit that uses the whole width of the painting. Its height is about a fifth of the total. A vertical heap rides on top of it, and the composition thus sets up not the letter T but the order of an inverted pedestal. The weight gathers below; the vertical heap above, meanwhile, lightens and disperses as it rises.
The vertical heap shows three tiers from bottom to top. At the very bottom two legs, thick and close together; in the middle the body, built from large touching roundnesses; at the top the head region, where the units shrink and grow in number. The widest place of the body is at the exact vertical centre of the painting, and its width is half that of the base. Going up, the mass first narrows, then widens again at head level. This second widening makes the heap unstable; the upper part is more active than the lower.
The ground is radial throughout. The diagonal strokes open outward from the upper central region and reach the four corners. These diagonal forces cut across the verticality of the figure; they are what breaks the monotony. The density of the rays is high in the upper left and upper right and thins out in the lower corners. At the bottom edge the ground has been left almost empty.
Above head level there is a crown of short vertical units. These are cramped, all looking up, of differing lengths. They work like a row of comb teeth, and the painting's only regular repetition is there. The gap between the top edge and this crown is about a hand's width; the crop does not cut the crown but leaves it no breathing room either.
At the right mid-height there is a separate small unit spilling outside the main mass. Two-tipped like a wing, its scale is about a third of the head, and it holds onto the body by a thin tie. On the left side, as its counterpart, a horizontal projection stretches from the body to the left, with a dark lump at its tip. The two projections are not at the same height; the left one is lower. In the lower right corner a thin straight-edged panel appears, seated on top of the mass on the ground, with no contact with the main heap. In the lower left corner, meanwhile, a branching dark extension goes outside the crop. The distribution of value is light above, dark in the middle, dark again below. The two darkest points are the wheels; both are almost black and are the painting's clearest roundnesses. Between them the ground mass stays at mid-value. The roundnesses in the body cannot be counted singly because they pass into one another; their boundaries appear only at the points of intersection. The figure's feet do not press onto the mass on the ground but sink into it; the place where the legs end is not visible, and the point of contact between the figure and its support disappears. That is the only place where the distinction collapses.
Colour and Light
Because the rounds that build the body have mixed while wet in dusty old rose and slate, no sharp boundary is left, and the clean and saturated colour is gathered around the head. Warm and cool are arranged layer by layer, and the pure black wheels at the very bottom open like holes because there is no other dark around them.
At the back the grey is laid in long strips that open outwards. But this is not a neutral grey; on the right cream and pale straw have got into it, on the left it comes close to lead. Between them there are places where the white has been left almost bare, the brush having passed swiftly through. This ground opens around the figure like a halo, like rays. Only, these rays carry no illumination with their colour, because on the figure there is not a single brightness that follows their direction.
The rounds that build the body are painted in dirtied colours. Dusty old rose, soapy pink, slate blue, extinguished brick. Into all of them white or their opposite has been mixed; none has stayed clean. When they come side by side they do not overpower one another, they stay at the same register. Where a round is blue at its centre it turns pink at its edge, and from beneath that pink a greenish grey comes out. The paints here have mixed on the canvas, and moreover while wet. Because of this there is nowhere on the body a sharp boundary between two colours; each round has taken a little of its neighbour's colour. The saturation is low but the value is unsteady, some patches darkening all at once.
All the clean colour is gathered in the region where the head is. Above, grass green vertical strokes, cadmium red between them, cobalt and lemon yellow in a few places; all of them short and saturated. This region does not speak the same language as the rest of the surface. The place where the red is highest is the round patch on the left side of the face, almost raw. The dark red ring at the centre of the body stands like a dimmed echo of it. An oxblood red holds the lower band. The long mass in the shape of a car is dark, matte and holds shadows close to black within it; on its right it slides to maroon, on its left to brown. The wheels are pure black and the very bottom of the surface is there. Because there is no other dark around this black the wheels look like holes. Under the red mass there is no shadow falling onto the ground, it continues at the same lightness as the grey ground beneath the car.
The warm and the cool are arranged layer by layer within the painting. At the bottom warm red, in the middle a body weighted with cool blue, at the top warm and sharp colours again. The background is the neutral grey that passes between all three of these bands. This arrangement does not break the figure from the ground, because the greyed pinks in the body are akin to the cream greys in the background. Where the legs end there is a small yellow and red splash, left beneath the foot. In the lower right corner there stands a signature thrown in black onto the cream ground; the darkest thing around it is the black of the wheels, and that signature is of the same black.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The wreathed figure on the cart with its hand raised carries the template of the triumphal procession, while the mass it treads on swings between a vehicle and the back of the defeated. The upright thorns on its head are not laurel but the crown of the punished king; the single small witness that takes the place of the crowd also shrinks the victory.
Below there is a red, two-wheeled long mass; it resembles the body of a cart and a large figure stands treading on it. The figure's feet are on that body, its weight placed on the right leg. Its arms are open to either side; the left arm reaches down and out and ends in a pointed tip, the right arm rises up and opens with fingers that separate like leaves. On its head a crown of green and black thorns rises. In the background rays disperse from the centre outward. The surface beneath the feet is not flat, but slightly sloped.
The name of this arrangement is the triumphal procession. The figure standing on a cart, its hand raised, carrying a wreath on its head; the same template repeats from images of emperors to images of saints. Where it treads matters, because the victor always stands on top of something. Here the thing below can be read both as a vehicle and as a prone body; at its front there is a protrusion resembling a head, at its back a part that lengthens like a tail. The triumphal cart and the back of the defeated are squeezed into the same form. What the thing trodden upon is also determines what kind of victory this is.
The thorns on the crown are not leaves. The laurel wreath is drawn soft and curling; the ones here are upright, sharp and irregular. The crown of thorns is the mark of the punished king and unites mockery and coronation in the same gesture. Where the face should be there are tangled rings; among them a few ovals resembling eyes can be made out, but which one is the seeing eye is not clear. The many-eyed head is one of the descriptions given to the highest rank of angels; the same detail appears in descriptions of monsters too. The rings that take the place of the face render the identity unreadable.
At the upper right, apart from the main body, a small figure stands. Its wing or arm is open, and its size, beside the other, remains that of a toy. It seems to be the only spectator of a ceremony without a crowd. A single small witness has taken the place of the people gathered at the edge of processions. This difference of scale sets up the hierarchy before the title. In triumphal processions the crowd serves to measure the greatness of the victor; the smaller the crowd, the smaller the victory.
The title looks into the body. The spleen, in old medicine and folk narrative, is held to be the place where anger and melancholy gather; combined with the word cell, it is implied that the same disposition is spread down to the smallest part of the body. The figure's body being built from countless bubbles feeds this reading. Each bubble stands like a separate organ, none of them joining another to make a single body. Where the feet end there is a red seepage, as though dripped onto the cart. The wheels are black and thick, and they have left a trace where they touch the ground. The drops accumulated on the cart suggest that this road has been used before as well.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The body planted on a toy car stands unbalanced, and the vehicle beneath it, rather than carrying it, waits to topple over. The head, meanwhile, has turned into an unravellable tangle and exceeded the boundary of the skull, and what cannot be held inside overflows from above and scatters out; the body is not a whole but parts piled side by side.
At the bottom stands a long, low car, and the body has climbed onto it. The wheels are two dark rings, thick like the wheels of toy cars. What is stood upon is not a vehicle, to my mind, but rather a seized toy. A large being has been planted on a small object and stands there. One of its feet seems sunk into the body of the car, the other props against its edge. There is no balance. This posture could break at any moment. In front of and behind the car there are thin black protrusions, like toy parts. They have nothing to do with the weight of the body above.
The body itself has formed from separate organs piled on top of one another. Each has its own edge, carries its own colour, does not merge into its neighbour. No sac, no membrane, no skin holding them together is visible. For this reason the body is not a whole but an accumulation. There are moments when a person feels their own insides not as an order but as a crowd of parts leaning against one another; the form here holds exactly that feeling. The belly is the most crowded place, it hangs downward, it has given its weight there. The legs come out from under this heap and do not resemble one another; one is thick and straight, the other curled.
The head is something else entirely. Above there are rings, folds, knots wound into one another. Among them an eye can be made out, and below a red mouth has opened. At the very top green and black thorns have shot out. Showing thought as an unravellable tangle is an old device; here that tangle has overflowed, exceeded the boundary of the skull, and is scattering upward. It is as if the lid of the head had lifted. What cannot be held inside comes out from above. The red patch at the corner of the mouth has spilled outward, descended below the chin.
On the right shoulder there is a small creature, its wings or ears opened. At the end of the left arm stands a sharp, dark extension. The body reaches things out to either side, but neither what it gives nor what it takes is clear. Its hands are not really hands, they are protrusions with altered tips. This is not a body that wants to hold, it is more like a body that wants to touch. The small creature on the shoulder is stuck to the body, it does not go anywhere apart from it.
The grey surface behind is scattered in rays, opening outward from the figure. The scene is lit. It looks here as though a show were being put on that no one is watching. A being that has climbed up, enlarged itself, scattered; and beneath it a toy that stands silently, going nowhere. The nose of the car reaches to the left edge of the painting and ends there in a black protrusion. One of the wheels does not touch the ground, it has stayed in the air; the vehicle too is not quite at rest.
Society, Power and Technology
The swollen body stepping onto the flattened car tells of a growth in which the goods bought in instalments make their owner taller but the cycle of debt never ends. The small figure watching from the edge without being able to buy represents, as the onlooker who carries desire for free, both advertising's real target and the market's cheapest fuel.
Below stands a car, long and broad, its wheels large. A body has stepped up onto it, its foot placed on the bonnet. The image of a man climbing onto a car is not strange to us; there is either a celebration or a fight. In both, the vehicle takes on meaning at the moment it is crushed beneath. The man's whole weight is on that metal and the metal seems to be bearing it, but its shape has been ruined, flattened like a toy.
The body is swollen. Round pieces are set on one another's backs, each widening the one before it a little more. This is a body that has grown by consuming things. A species that widens the more it takes, that takes up more room the more it widens, that counts the room it takes up as its due. Bodies that grow with the credit-card statement, let us say. The car bought in thirty-six instalments makes its owner taller on the day it is bought; before the instalments are finished the model grows old, the height shrinks again and a new set of instalments begins. The tiresome side of a prestige built on debt is that this cycle never ends. Past a certain point a person begins to carry his possessions not for himself but for the eye of the neighbourhood; his payment plan, meanwhile, he shows to no one.
On top of the head there is a tuft standing straight up, whether hair or feather is not clear, it looks like an ornament. And on the right there is a small figure, at the edge, watching what is going on. That small one is not part of the scene, nor has it climbed onto the car. It counts as the representative of the crowd of onlookers. The person who stands before the shop window and looks, who cannot buy, but who goes on looking. The most productive side of consumption is not the buyers but those who cannot buy and watch; they carry the desire for free. The real target of advertising budgets is in fact them. The one who bought has already bought, the campaign is over; the one who does not buy goes on waiting for years, and that waiting is the market's cheapest fuel.
The background is scattered in lines, as though the whole surface were gathering towards the body in the centre. There is an order that turns everything around the thing standing at the centre towards itself. The street works this way too; the large vehicle parked in the middle of the avenue cuts off the pedestrian's path and no one makes a sound. Taking up room in the city has become a matter not of right but of power. The fight between the width of the pavement and the width of the car is always won by the same side. The woman pushing a pram steps down into the road so as not to hit the pole, the man in the wheelchair cannot cross to the other side of the road, and no one counts this as a problem.
In the figure's hand there is a small thing, what it is cannot be made out, it is stretched forward. Whether it is showing it, selling it, about to throw it, I do not know. But the way it is held is the grip of possessing something, it has seized it. There is a thin piece hanging down from the nose of the car, and it too has touched the ground.
Art History and Comparison
In Verrocchio's equestrian monument the animal below shows force, the one above authority; here below there is not a horse but a toy car, and although the ceremonial form stands, its contract has been cancelled. Whereas Marino Marini collapses the ceremony by making his rider fall, the cancellation here comes about through a change of scale; the figure stays firm, its pedestal shrinks.
Below stands a red car with two thick black wheels, and the large body above it presses right on its back. It is not sitting, it is standing; one of its legs falls to the back of the car, the other to the middle. The monumentalising of a rider together with the animal beneath him is a ceremonial form that has continued since Rome, carrying the same proposition from Marcus Aurelius to Verrocchio's condottiere in Venice: the one below shows living force, the one above the authority to command it. Here the one below is not a horse but a toy-sized car. And the one above is not commanding, it is merely standing on top of it. The ceremonial form has been preserved, while the contract that keeps the ceremony standing has been cancelled.
The body is built from head to toe out of bubbles, the navel a balloon, the hip another balloon, in place of the chest interlocking rings. The title already speaks of the cell. What is to be noticed is the size of these cells; whereas in the series' 2019 works the bubbles were small and crowded, here each has grown to the size of a palm, and their number has decreased. That is, the unit is enlarging, the figure is simplifying. This direction will go on until, in the large canvas dated 2023, the unit turns into a single brush-stroke. To see the connection between them, this work is a good stopping point.
The head, however, is made with a different logic. In place of the full lumps of the body, here thin loops passing over one another take over, and at the top a hair bursts out in the form of green thorns. Working at the boundary between scribble and painting was Twombly's field in the second half of the twentieth century; his loops approach writing, stand sparse, breathe with the emptiness of the surface. The loops here, on the contrary, pile up on one another and turn into a head, leaving no emptiness. Scribble here is not a habit of the hand, but a method of producing an organ.
In this canvas the toy idea of the series has moved beneath the figure. The small things that in other works sit at the edges and watch what is going on have here turned into a vehicle; the car's body is painted flat, its wheels turned in two strokes, and there is no door or window. An object that has come out of a child's room serves as the pedestal of a monument. In the middle right there is a blue-red piece standing like a wing, as though it had separated from the body and stayed hanging in the air. The hand at the end of the left arm, too, stretches away without connecting to the body, left thin like a stick.
One of the problems twentieth-century figurative painting inherited was this too: to use the template of the monument and cancel the monument. In post-war Italian sculpture Marino Marini's riders did this work by falling, the rider slides off the horse, the ceremony collapses. The cancellation here comes about not through falling but through a change of scale; the figure stands firm, the vehicle beneath it shrinks. The incongruity between an upright body and a toy pedestal carries the whole canvas. On the ground, long brush-marks combed like rays pass behind the figure; they do not set up a space, they only leave a movement that leaves the figure in the middle. The nose of the car spills outside the canvas at the left edge and ends there in a black protrusion whose nature is unclear.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
When the blue and red lumps came over each other while wet at the centre of the body, the brush lifted the lower one and left a dirty band tinged with purple between them, and this was not cleaned up. The long drags in the back ground go upward at the upper left and downward at the lower right; this change of direction is the record of the body roaming along the canvas.
Where the large blue lump at the centre of the body meets the red lump above it, the paint has turned to mud. The two came over each other while both were wet, the brush as it passed lifted the lower one up and left a dirty band tinged with purple between them. He did not attempt to clean this. The same muddying is there on the right of the belly where green and red intersect; there it has gone even further and the colour has become completely indistinct. Working with acrylic, this is the price of keeping your hand fast; he paid the price he paid and carried on. Looking at the edges of the lumps I see that they were all closed with a single turning movement, and as the brush completed the circle it passed over its own beginning somewhere, and there the paint stayed two coats thick.
The back ground is set up with long drags opening outward from the figure. The brush is broad and flat; at the start of each drag the paint is plentiful, at the end it runs out and the weave of the canvas shows itself. These drags are so thinned that the cloth beneath breathes easily, and in places a beige underlayer seeps through. The direction is not always the same; at the upper left they go upward, at the lower right downward. The position of the arm has changed, a step has been taken. You cannot paint a work of a metre twenty from a single standing position, the body has to roam along the canvas, and the directions of the marks here are the record of that roaming.
The green and black hatchings at the top are made with a stiff-bristled and almost dry brush, pushed upward. Where it pressed and let go, the bristles spread, each stroke splitting into two or three separate lines. In some places the paint spattered, small dots fell to the lower part and were not wiped away. The head region beneath, on the contrary, is full; the red, yellow and navy rings are thick and ride over one another, and there the surface swells.
The car below is the place laid on thinnest. The burgundy is almost like a patch, the grey beneath reads along its whole length and makes you feel that the body is flat. On its front a thin red run descended and stopped; at that moment the paint had been watered. The wheels, meanwhile, are made with a circular dragging, black overlaid turning and turning, a white gap left at their centres. The black projections at the front end of the car are flung too with the tip of the brush, in single flicks; the paint there is very scant and hangs on the crests of the weave.
One metre by a metre twenty; when I step in front of it the figure's feet stay above my knee and its head above my own head. Looked at from two metres the body is a single mass. At a metre the mass separates into lumps. At half a metre the lumps too fall apart, leaving behind layers of paint running wetly into one another. In the lower right corner, right beside the signature, beneath the grey ground stands a piece of unpainted cloth; the cold white of the primer waits there like a punctuation mark.
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